Early morning::::…….
Copenhagen Graffiti (TRAINS)!!!!!!!!
TRAINS::::………….. SHIT!
Michael Bevilacqua
Angel Otero
Kavi Gupta is pleased to annouce it’s first solo exhibition of Angel Otero’s work. Angel Otero is quickly becoming well known for his textured canvases that weave between abstraction and representation taking their subject matter from an ongoing personal and often autobiographical narrative from his childhood in Puerto Rico. Memories, particularly those from his grandmother, parallel what he is now embracing in contemporary art.
Otero’s paintings and sculptural assemblages also engage directly with a process-based art making. His works are extremely intuitive and often address the idea of failure and the push/pull of painting an inventive space that also relates directly to his own personal history. Structures attempt to balance the slippage between subject and object. Layers of silicone become fluid doilies floating on table tops and thick shapes of dried oil paint are glued into simple patterns recalled from memory.
The work doesn’t operate as a presentation but rather as a self-generating proposition with which to construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct meaning over and over again. Unusual materials and aesthetic extravagance have been inspiring his recent work. Scale is expanding to comment of monumentality, surrounding the viewer and transforming the work to become physically accessible and present. His explorations of personal symbology as well as abstract expressionism that brings to mind painters that continue to influence his work such as Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Georg Baselitz, and Joan Mitchell.
Angel Otero (b. 1981, Santurce, Puerto Rico) was recently including in the Constellations exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. He is the 2009 recipient of the Leonore Annenberg Fellowship Fund in the Performing and Visual Arts. Otero has an upcoming solo show at the Chicago Cultural Center.
Conversations: Words & Images in Action
Cope 2
Gert & Uwe Tobias @ La Conservera, Murcia
Banks Violette
The cold, minimalist visual language Banks Violette (b. 1973, New York) uses, refers to the dark side of American culture: the gothic scene, satanic rituals, death metal,… Violette’s installations evoke violence, aggression and excess, without lapsing into anecdotalism. They are perceived as settings or decors that evoke a desolate mood, as if they were the scene of some violent act or performance. The alienating atmosphere is intensified by the materials used and the spatial interventions. Banks will fill the exhibition hall of the museum Dhondt-Dhaenens with sculptures and three-dimensional installations, creating a sustained tension and presenting a dark and abstract interpretation of our Western culture.
“Ongoing Projects”
Metro Pictures “Ongoing Projects” brings together work by Robert Longo, John Miller and David Maljkovic. Longo exhibits fourteen photographs printed from the original 1970’s negatives he shot for his iconic “Men in the Cities” drawings. David Maljkovic is represented by his newest film installation, “Out of Projection,” that expands on his exploration of memories as futurist propositions. John Miller’s “Middle of the Day” project includes photographs produced over a fifteen-year period here presented on DVD with a compilation of more than 700 images.
This marks the first exhibition of the earliest photographs Robert Longo took as studies for his well-known “Men in the Cities” drawings of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. The photographs taken in his studio and on the roof of his South Street studio were not made into prints but projected onto large sheets of paper. The photographs provide specific location and period to the large abstracted drawings that have permeated our media culture in everything from ipod ads to the opening credits of the TV series Mad Men. Views of Manhattan rooftops and the East River replace the white background of the drawings, and jeans, sneakers, and jackets replace the deep black of the figures’ suits. Longo elicited the now classic, contorted poses by verbally exhorting and tossing film canisters at the models who were artist and musician friends.
David Maljkovic’s new, 2-channel film, “Out of Projection,” references antithetical film genres—science fiction and documentary. “Out of Projection” was filmed at the carefully guarded test track of Peugeot headquarters in the French city of Souchaux. His use of Peugeot prototypes as props follows the artist’s past use of futuristic automobile prototypes in Croatian Modernist architectural settings. The primary, large screen in the installation shows the film’s protagonists, elderly couples who in the film build ideas for future projects. They are actual retired company workers who act as a medium between past and future, moving slowly around the test track alongside the car prototypes. The second, smaller projection is of close-up interviews with individual workers in silent recollection, eerily blurring the past and the future.
John Miller’s “Middle of the Day” project began in 1994 and continues to the present. The photographs document the artist’s location during the hours of noon and 2 PM, when there is little shadow and universally, people are on down time. These random images include bucolic landscapes, still lives, domestic interiors, street scenes, people and objects that all incidentally document the travel associated with an artist’s professional and personal life. These works have previously only been exhibited as color photographs, but for this exhibition Miller will show a compilation of hundreds of images in slideshow format on a flat-screen monitor, accompanied by a soundtrack he composed using ambient noises recorded in and around his home.
Robert Longo lives in New York. A survey exhibition of his work is on view at Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain, Nice until December 20 and will travel to The Berardo Museum Collection, Lisbon, February 1 – April 25, 2010. Previous one-person exhibitions include Hamburger Kunstverein and Deichtorhallen in Hamburg; Menil Collection in Houston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Albertina in Vienna; and The Isetan Museum in Tokyo.
David Maljkovic lives in Zagreb, Croatia. “Out of Projection” is currently on view at the Reina Sofia in Madrid until January 18, 2010. Previous one-person exhibitions include The Whitechapel Art Gallery in London; the Kunstverein in Hamburg; and P.S. 1 in New York. Maljkovic had his first exhibition at Metro Pictures in 2008.
John Miller lives and works in New York where he teaches at Columbia University. One-person exhibitions include a retrospective this year at the Kunsthalle in Zurich; Center for Contemporary Art in Tokyo; the Kunstverein in Hamburg; Magasin-Centre National d’Art Contemporain in Grenoble; and P.S. 1 in New York. His work was included in the Whitney Biennials in 1985 and 1991 and he has exhibited regularly at Metro Pictures since 1984.
